I currently have hosting with two domain companies. This site is with Host Papa and my other two sites are with Host Monster. I will very soon be moving the other two over to Host Papa, even though I have not completed my evaluation of them. Host Monster is down far too often causing too much work on my end and too much down time for my users.
Here is my overall review of the service I have received from Host Monster:
Price
$6.95 per month for their basic service. This is a fairly good price, but you need to buy 2 years of hosting to get that price. They will also register your domain name for you. The price is good. There are some lower, but not many that have as many services to offer. B+
Customer Service
I have often used the customer service. The offer it in more than one form. They have phone support, chat support, and email support. I've never used the email support.
Phone support I only used twice. It was fine, but not spectacular. The tech on the first call was somewhat knowledgeable. Better than you usually get in phone support, including when I was one of the people answering the phones. The second guy was not so knowledgeable. I had to explain to him what I needed of him, it took him 20 minutes to do a 1 minute fix, then misunderstood what I needed and wasted another 10 minutes trying to do something else before I realized what was going on and stopped him.
The chat support I have used quite a bit. At times it was very good. Most of the time it took them a couple minutes to respond between each comment, as they were helping several others on chat as well. A couple times it took more than 10 minutes between question and answer. A minute or two I can understand, but 10 minutes is a bit much, after I've waited on "hold" for several minutes already.
Phone support is a hard job and usually the techs are not that good. They often think they are and have high egos about their worth. I was no exception. It is a place to start in IT. The pay is low and the work is not great. You have to deal with a lot of jerks. Still, you can have a good staff, if you train them properly and give them supports. Overall, the support here was lower than I'd like, but honestly about what I've come to expect from tech support. C
Uptime
The server is often running slowly. About twice a week it goes down completely. Sometimes for just a minute or two, other times for an hour or more. Once for nearly 15 hours. Even if the server is up, MySQL goes down regularly as well. Since my sites are database driven, this amounts to the site going down. D
Guarantee
I learned about uptime guarantees during that 15 hour outage. I contacted the support center about their guarantee, since it had gone way over their guarantee. "unfortunately the guarantee is a server guarantee and since we have hundreds of servers, one going down does not effect the guarantee." She then went on to tell me that I should go to a better service.
They did offer a 30 day money back guarantee, but now I do not see that on their site. You can though, end your contract at any time with no cancellation fee. You will get your unused credits back. C-
Products Offered
They have all the standard features, including SSH, PHP, MySQL and more. The also now offer unlimited space and bandwidth, 100 databases, unlimited email forwarding and many other features. They do not, however, offer a catchall email account which is a big fault which knocks them down a grade. B
Affiliates
If you sign up for the affiliate program from their website, they will give you $65 per referral. If, however, you go to Commission Junction and sign up there, you will receive $90 per referral. If you follow my links and sign up, I get the $90 referral. They pay well, but not the highest. A-
Overall grade
I don't include the affiliate grade in my final grade, as I think that would bias the final grade toward those that pay me well. I don't want you to pick someone just because I get a good commission, especially if you don't realize that is why they scored well. C/C+